Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Wednesday September 14, 2005 @07:37PM
from the see-capitalism-is-a-good-thing dept.

tonyq writes "Yahoo! is beginning beta testing of a completely reworked UI for Yahoo! Mail that incorporates DHTML technologies. The web-based application resembles a desktop e-mail client. Features include message preview; drag-and-drop filing; the capability of quickly searching e-mail headers, body text and attachments; and the ability to view multiple e-mails at the same time in separate windows and scroll through all message headers in a folder rather than one page at a time. Other niceties are auto-complete, right-click menus and standard keyboard shortcuts. A user who got an early look has graciously posted screenshots. Yahoo is also taking signups on their what's new for Mail page."

I saw the new interface when my cousin, who works for yahoo was visiting. He was borrowing a computer, and I looked up and saw what I thought was Outlook Express. I went over to tell him the virtues of Firefox, when I realized what I saw was really an impressive browser based mail client.

This was back in early August, he said employees had been using it for a while, but it was hush-hush. He seemed pretty sheepish about it, and made me promise not to post on Slashdot, apparently yahoo wanted it under wraps for as long as possible.

He did give me the dog and pony show, and I must say that it really is a pretty slick application. Though I did not get to really test it, just watched him walk through it.

I own a small hosting company,and wanted to see what web-based mail clients were out there that I could use for my customers. Squirelmail and TWIG looked pretty ugly in comparison. Incidently I found an open source mail client that has a lot of similar functions: Round Cube I haveinstalled that and it is almost as impressive. [roundcube.net]

Anyway, it is amzing how far web applications have come in such a short period.

Seriously, though thank you for SquirellMail. It along with TWIG, and Iloha mail have been open source staples for my clients for a long time.

In many cases these mail clients were the first direct exposure (hands on) that those users had to open source software. I have many users insist upon using SquirrellMail as their sole email application.

hehe, I know that feeling. I worked on Geeklog a while back, and when I saw it was being used for Groklaw, I was smiling for hours. In many ways, that's what brings me back to working within Open Source projects when I find a bit of time.

I own a small hosting company,and wanted to see what web-based mail clients were out there that I could use for my customers. Squirelmail and TWIG looked pretty ugly in comparison.

There are lots of good ones out there now. If the customer doesn't already have an email infrastructure, you might also want to have a look at Citadel [citadel.org], which has all of its data stores and protocols built in (even its own HTTP engine so you don't have to integrate it into your Apache server). It has an attractive web UI with a

Round Cube is pretty nice and a real step up in interface design over squirrelmail, but still has some bugs and is a bit slow if you have large mailboxes. But then again, it was just released last month.;-)

I'm working on encorporating it into suso.org already. I submitted some code back to the author to deal with long folder names and stuff.

It looks pretty nice, but I am just surprised it requires MySQL. Is that for storing configs?

Just a guess, but maybe it pulls from an IMAP account and puts all the data into a database. None of this is my forte, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it would be easier to do clever things with data in MySQL than pulling it live out of a IMAP server. Things like index the text in e-mails, maybe store an address book, caching for quicker access. Or maybe they have something very clever planned for the fut

I could see the address book being stored in MySQL, so I'll concede that. But with a high performance server like Cyrus (with whatever backend you want) the webmail system should not do its own storage of mail.

I just installed this and I'm looking at the MySQL tables, it looks like for settings and contacts. I think that using contacts in SQL is a very good idea, because you can back it up easier through phpMyAdmin, rather than trying to figure out which file stores your contacts, and converting it to d

Unfortunately, its conduct is not out of the ordinary, either for it or for other American media firms operating in China. They all eagerly kowtow to a despicable police state

I hope you are boycotting Google, Microsoft and Cisco as well. I want you to come out and say explicitly what standard you are holding Yahoo to, and what companies currently meet that standard, and what evidence you have that those companies meet that standard.

I hope this new interface is optional. Part of the reason I've been using Yahoo Mail for so long was BECAUSE of its very simple and straightforward interface. Taking that away removes yet another reason to stay with them instead of finally letting go.

I hope this new interface is optional. Part of the reason I've been using Yahoo Mail for so long was BECAUSE of its very simple and straightforward interface. Taking that away removes yet another reason to stay with them instead of finally letting go.

I agree. If only they'd made it with that new 'AJAX' technology instead of DHTML...

If you want worthwhile encryption on your email, use a host based email client that supports GPG. If your email is open to the world as it flies between servers and sits in their caches and spools, it doesn't really matter if it's open to the world as it flies between you and your webmail host.

The easiest way to do it securely with Javascript would be to send a challenge to the client over regular HTTP, request the user's password, combine the challenge and password and run it through a hashing algo like MD5 or SHA to produce the respone.

The server then takes the challenge and the stored password, hashes them and if the hash matches that sent by the cli

In fact, that's how Yahoo has been working since at least a long time: the server sends a challenge that the browser appends to the MD5 hash of the password and sends the MD5 hash of the combination back.

"Yahoo doesn't need an answer to Gmail. They have an order of magnitude more users (63.3 mln vs 5.4 mln)."

It's about an order of magnitude slower too. I can be in and done with Gmail (which is receiving most of my mail now) in the length of time it takes yahoo to respond to my first click. Not to mention the ads they run take up half the screen.

Then you must have a paid annual subscription to a mailbox - before GMail my biggest free account was only 100MB (had many yahoo accounts, they seemed to increase some mailboxes' size with age or something for loyal 'customers').

Switched back in June. Right now, I still like GMail just for the "conversation" feature which keeps my mailbox from being cluttered with "re:re:re:adinfinity" crap. I'm probably gonna stick with it unless Yahoo really comes out with something killer.

Give your email that personal touch with mail made just foryou get you@your-name.com or any other address that is available! Personal Address includes your own domain and five different email addresses that

Have you forgotten that typical emails will pass between a number of hosts unencrypted as it is being delivered? Where's the advantage in encrypting the last leg of the journey if none of the others are encrypted?

because during the last leg of the journey is when people who know you personally are likely to interfere. for example, the network admin at your job may find out that you have been quitely trying to sue the corp, and your vulnerabilities were discussed with the lawyer over personal email. now, any other admin spying wouldnt care except for the fact that this is YOUR admin at your job.

Because your mail is still unencrypted on their disk and when travelling between servers.

If you want confidentiality, authentication, and non-repudiation, use GPG and a host based email client. If you want a throw away account for signing up to web forums and personals sites, use webmail services.

(But I think they should be using TLS for the login stage of webmail services)

Actually, I read a bunch of the YoSucker(..sf.net) source code awhile ago, and as far as I could tell, Yahoo! apparently did Javascript hashing (~MD5) of your password before sending it over HTTP, with some kind of session negotiation/salt done before the form submission page. I thought that was pretty damn cool. Personally, I always hit "Shift-tab, 'sec [enter]" in Firefox before ever logging into Yahoo! mail, but I think you stand a bit more of a chance with security on their site than others.

Zimbra is much more than just mail client. To quote a SitePoint [sitepoint.com] mailing list,

"Billed as an online collaboration server with an AJAX-powered Web client, Zimbra will run on a Linux server and behave as a dedicated email, calendar, and directory server (in fact, it has Postfix, an open source email server, built in), accessible with desktop email, calendar, and address book applications like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird/Sunbird, Apple Mail/iCal, and others.

Where are the ads? This is Yahoo and they need to generate revenue. I don't like Yahoo mail because of all the ads in the current incarnation. I think this is probably a bit deceptive. There's gotta be ads in there somewhere, lots of them.

If it makes you feel better, I'm sure there will be "Do You Yahoo?" advertising footer on every piece of outgoing piece of mail... the same kind of footer the rest of us need to go out of our way to strip out when receiving mail from folks insisting on using web-based email.

Sometimes, aiming to make a UI *too* feature-intensive, can be it's undoing.

Take Gmail. It's clear, concise, and uses Basic HTML to navigate. Frankly, DHTML is just the web-equivalent of "Feature Bloat". Fine, it looks good, and it'll dazzle the users, but it may also overwhelm them, too.

I saw DHTML in practice when Barryworld still existed. The DHTML interface was so slow, and so horrible (Even on a 4MB Line, with Dell Optiplexes), I went back to POP3. I'm hoping Yahoo won't make the same mistakes, and at least offer a more "Streamlined" approach for the users that don't care about bells and whistles.

The special version provided for older browsers does. But normal GMail certainly doesn't. It's really frustrating to try and open links in new windows only to find that they aren't links at all but some kind of pseudo-link created with spans and onclicks that doesn't work properly.

Google really don't have a clue when it comes to Javascript. Yeah, they come up with good features, but their implementation sucks. For example, it took [jibbering.com]

It's too bad that I've been phasing out my Yahoo email account. Anyone know of an opensource webmail package that is even close to this interface? Squirrelmail is looking a little shabby in comparison.

I use Yahoo for nearly everything (all family events in Calendar, saved Maps for soccer fields and restaurants, Weather, and Contacts/ToDo), but I switched to Gmail for email as soon as I could.

I am so reliant on Labels - it just makes so much sense that any email can really be in more than one folder. (In fact, since being forced to use Outlook 2003 at work, I've forgone folders and used it’s Category feature which work remarkable similar to Gmail Labels to organize my work email - I can use Outlook's search to organize/search by Category).

Yahoo bought out oddpost in 2004. If you'll remember, they were the first to put together a really slick DHTML-based email application. What you see here is a result of merging the technology Ethan and Ian had developed with Yahoo's infrastructure (plus a great deal more - tabs and other features that aren't part of oddpost).
Glad to see a little dotrebound company like Oddpost make a mark!

I am a CS person, and know very little about Web design, so this post may be somewhat unknowlegable. But I remember back 3 years ago doing some stuff w/ DHTML for a class. It seemed quick, simple, useful, yet DHTML was something I hardly ever saw (and still hardly every see) anywhere. Although not as flashy as flash-based interfaces (no pun intended), it seemed to work well on even fairly weak systems. Does this still hold true nowadays with so many web pages going with flash that sometimes maxes out my

DHTML (as in using JavaScript to manipulate page elements) is usually much slower than even Flash (and anybody who's read my comment history knows that I hate Flash with a passion). JavaScript is a simplistic language that usually doesn't have a "nice" way of doing things. When you're using DHTML and having to deal with both JavaScript slowness and the browser having to move around styled HTML elements, it can get pretty hairy. Google uses DHTML for, well, almost everything, and even their extremely nice co

IMHO, it's because browser support sucks with all bleeding edge web "standards". It's not so much that modern browsers (e.g. Firefox 1.0+, IE6+) are a problem, but the fact that old web browsers (e.g. NS4, IE4) take years to die off from "common" useage. I still see a few "version 4" browsers show up in my web server logs... but the numbers are small enough now that in most cases, I don't really care if my site works for them or not.

GMail started allowing that a few weeks ago. AFAIK, its the only free email service that gives you that ability. For me, its a very significant feature. It suddenly allows me to use GMail as a general purpose email client.

Something I just blogged about (mostly just to make sure I didn't forget it!) was an idea for autoconverting docs via a mail system.

Yahoo Mail already seems to do a bit of converting some MS Office docs into HTML for viewing in your browser. What I'm talking about is the next step: autoconvert between openoffice and ms office.

I send someone an.SXW or.ODT file via Yahoo Mail. Y! converts the file int a.DOC file, then sends it to the recipient. They edit, send back, and it automatically converts it back to a.SXW or.ODT file (whatever my preference is).

I know there would be a lot of bugs and things that wouldn't work right to start with, but leave it in beta for awhile (perhaps gmail should offer this then?). However, I think the long term good could outweigh the short term drawbacks. Yes, there's a privacy concern, but if you're really that concerned about the docs you shouldn't be using public mail systems in the first place, right?

Are they just rolling this out to users at random? I'm a paid subscriber (Plus user) and I didn't get the change...I even signed up on their Mail Beta user tester page. You would think paying customers would get all the new toys first.

One of the things I dislike the most about Yahoo! Mail is their login process..

1. It defaults to clear http, not https. Nice way to encourage users to expose their passwords... This should obviously default to https, and require users to jump through hoops to send their password in the clear. (GMail uses https for authentication).

2. Authentication only lasts a day, then your session expires and you have to re-authenticate. For me, the expiration usually happened when I was typing a long reply to an e-mail, and clicked "send" only to be greeted with the error message saying I needed to authenticate again (in the clear), and my message was lost.

This combination is particularly briliant... encourage insecure authentication, then require users to do it often.

This is just one of many ways that GMail beats Yahoo! Mail.. I'll check out the improvements, but I doubt I'll ever go back to Yahoo.

When is Yahoo going to get their head out of their ass and offer POP3 access? Google offers a superior service, more space, and Pop3. And yahoo mail is NOT worth the $19 a year just to get the same features as google.
Sorry Yahoo, not news worthy! Thanks for playing though.

I use my Yahoo! Mail that I've had since
about 1998 on a daily basis, and I really
only want one new feature:
I want to be able to move to the next message
in the list in well under a second.

Preferably,
now that I am sitting at a computer with a
1.25 MHz PowerPC processor and 1 GB of RAM,
I'd like to be able to do this as fast as I
used to be able to do on a SPARCstation 2
(which had a 40 MHz processor) equipped with
a whopping 64 MB of RAM. Ten years
ago, on that computer that was 1.5 orders of
magnitude slower than the one I'm using now,
I could go to the next message in about
0.1 seconds.

Yes, I realize there are web servers and
things (like the open Internet) involved
here, but it should still be do-able.
If need be, they could easily prefetch
and cache messages in the browser's
memory, so that when I hit the "next"
button, it goes there right away.
And I don't mind if unusually large
messages don't load that quickly.

It would also be nice to be able to jump
from mailbox index to message body and back
in a fraction of a second and vice versa,
while I'm asking for things.

This all sounds nice, I will enjoy it, but what I really want from everyone...my web mail, google's usenet, mozilla's news client and the people who make web board software is better filtering.

Yahoo ( the paid version ) has good anti-spam features, but I could get so much more out of them if their plain old filters were more flexible/ powerful.

With the exception of slashdot, most web based forums suffer from either too much control or too little control. The site owners do not want to play umpire, hear complaints, etc and I can't blame them. The time has come for 100% ( note the 100% ) user controlled content.

By this I mean giving the user the ability to make it as if a regular objectionable poster never existed in the forum. Making his/her original posts vanish, along with all replys to his/her post and any mention of him/her.

The org that comes out with this first ( proprietary or open source ) will be able to very visibly set their software apart from all other similar software. The forum owner who implements such software will have a hook for drawing in members, his/her board will not just be another board among many boards for that same subject.

People really want this.

Google seems to be hesitant about these kind of filters. The mozilla mail client will take the entire thread/tree of posts out, they know it is a bug, but nobody seems motivated to fix it.

Yahoo can give their email filters much more flexibility and power, but they do not.

I'm guessing filters are a lot of work, that is why these various groups have been slow to do it.

It seems like what people want the most, more control in getting rid of the crap they don't want.